Purpose The Covid-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented stress to students and educational institutions across the world. We aimed to estimate the effect of the pandemic on the mental health of college students. Methods We used data on 419 first-year students (ages 18–20) at a large public university in North Carolina both before (October 2019-February 2020) and after (June/July 2020) the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. After evaluating descriptive data on mental health and stressors by students’ demographic characteristics, we estimated the associations between Covid-19 stressors (including work reductions, health, distanced learning difficulties and social isolation) and mental health symptoms and severity controlling for students’ pre-pandemic mental health, psychosocial resources, and demographic characteristics. Results We found that the prevalence of moderate-severe anxiety increased from 18.1% before the pandemic to 25.3% within four months after the pandemic began; and the prevalence of moderate-severe depression increased from 21.5% to 31.7%. White, female and sexual/gender minority (SGM) students were at highest risk of increases in anxiety symptoms. Non-Hispanic (NH) Black, female, and SGM students were at highest risk of increases in depression symptoms. General difficulties associated with distanced learning and social isolation contributed to the increases in both depression and anxiety symptoms. However, work reductions as well as Covid-19 diagnosis and hospitalization of oneself, family members or friends were not associated with increases in depression or anxiety symptoms. Conclusion Colleges may be able to reduce the mental health consequences of Covid-19 by investing in resources to reduce difficulties with distance learning and reduce social isolation during the pandemic.

Increasingly, grade retention is viewed as an important alternative to social promotion, yet evidence to date is unable to disentangle how the effect of grade retention varies by abilities and over time. The key challenge is differential selection of students into retention across grades and by abilities. Because existing quasi-experimental methods cannot address this question, we develop a new strategy that is a hybrid between a control function and a generalization of the fixed effects approach. Applying our method to nationally-representative, longitudinal data, we find evidence of dynamic selection into retention and that the treatment effect of retention varies considerably across grades and unobservable abilities of students. Our strategy can be applied more broadly to many time-varying or multiple treatment settings.

We propose a new strategy for a pervasive problem in the hedonics literature: recovering hedonic prices in the presence of time-varying correlated unobservables. Our approach relies on an assumption about home buyer rationality, under which prior sales prices can be used to control for time-varying unobservable attributes of the house or neighborhood. Using housing transactions data from California's Bay Area between 1990 and 2006, we apply our estimator to recover marginal willingness to pay for reductions in three of the EPA's “criteria” air pollutants. Our findings suggest that ignoring bias from time-varying correlated unobservables considerably understates the benefits of a pollution reduction policy. (JEL D12, D84, Q53, Q58, R21)

This paper develops a new approach to identifying peer achievement spillovers in the context of an equilibrium model of student effort choices. By focusing on the effect of contemporaneous peer achievement, this framework integrates previously unexplored types of heterogeneity in peer spillovers in the achievement production context. Applying the strategy to North Carolina public elementary school students, I find peer achievement spillovers exist primarily within race‐based reference groups, and the magnitude of these spillovers diminishes across the percentiles of the achievement distribution. Simulations highlight the importance of peer achievement spillovers for determining the distributional effects of desegregation relative to flexible reduced‐form specifications that focus entirely on predetermined peer characteristics.

The probability of being depressed increases dramatically during adolescence and is linked to a range of adverse outcomes. Many studies show a correlation between religiosity and mental health, yet the question remains whether the link is causal. The key issue is selection into religiosity. We exploit plausibly random variation in adolescents' peers to shift religiosity independently of individual-level unobservables that might affect depression, and show conditions such that an individual effect of religiosity is separated from the potential direct effect of peers. Using a nationally representative sample of adolescents in the US, we find robust effects of religiosity on depression, that are particularly strong for the most depressed. We demonstrate that these effects are not driven by the school social context. We find that religiosity buffers against stressors, possibly through improved psychological resources and religion-based support structures. This has implications especially for effective mental health policy. JEL Codes: I10, Z12 * Fruehwirth thanks the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust's Philip Leverhulme Prize for financial support. We thank